Whether on the theatrical stageoratapoliticalrally, the first-person plural
pronounduring the first decades of the twentieth century served threeinterrelat-
ed psychological and discursive functions: asadeclaration of group belonging
that established clear distinctions between self and other;asacollective mode
of enunciation that presumed full agreement between performers and specta-
tors;and asagesture of empowerment thatdefined thevery terms of speaking,
moving,and acting inapublic space.At times, saying“we”involved an act of
professinginfront ofacommunity of believers; in such cases, the dividing
line between spectacle andaudience hadto be preserved in order toguarantee
the desired effect of self-mirroring.At other times, the massspectacle turned into
ademonstration of shared political will that,atany point,could spill over into
the streets.³Within the highlypoliticized theater of theWeimar Republic, estab-
lishing the conditions under which performances of“we”became possiblere-
quired the mobilization of all artistic meansinthe making ofathus defined pro-
letarianGesamtkunstwerk(totalwork of art). TheSprechchorstaged multitudes,
moved collectivities, and forgedcommunities–goals that,onthe following
pages, will be examined through the lens of emotions and their contribution
to the performance of the proletarian dream.Fewplays are better suited to
shed light on these performances and situate them in the largercontext of social-
ist theater and massspectacle thanWir! Ein sozialistischesFestspiel(1932,We! A
SocialistFestival) by theBelgian-born HendrikdeMan (1885–1953).
Assessingthe contribution of theSprechchorto socialist event culturere-
quires thatmassspectaclesbetreated asaform of public practice andaproduc-
tion of community.Concretely, this meansthat the entirerangeofaesthetic
means (theater architecture as well as lighting, sound, music, costume, and
set design) is enlisted inaperformance-based understanding of class identifica-
tions. Naturally, such an approach cannot be developed on the basis of scripts,
notes,sketches, photographs,and reviews alone.It requires further engagement
with the performative categories first introduced in chapter 4onthe workers’
choral societies.⁴Fortunately, growinginterest in performance and performativ-
ity as critical categories has brought renewedattentiontoforgotten or neglected
practices that have always existed outside the institution of bourgeois theater
and that continue to challengestandard histories of the rise of postdramatic the-
ater out of 1960savant-garde practices.Inemphasizing the performed(i.e., con-
structed) nature of identitiesand acknowledging the role of embodiment in
On the people asadramatic subject,see HanneloreSchlaffer,Dramenform und Klassenstruk-
tur:Eine Analyse der dramatis personae“Volk”(Stuttgart: Metzler,1972).
Therehas been renewed interest in theSprechchor,asevidenced by the2013 performance of
parts of Bruno Schönlank’sDer gespaltene Menschat the Mousonturm inFrankfurt am Main.
224 Chapter12